The problem with government services is the rampant fraud. In such cases, fraud is often guilt-free since the government is perceived to have infinite resources. This tempts otherwise honest people to "try their luck" free of conscience, and in most cases, consequence. These silly rules and barriers are meant to increase friction for fraudsters. Unfortunately it comes at the expense of legitimate claimants. I feel your pain and I also feel hers.

The SSA is one of the largest federal employers of blind people. "Karen" could easily be a blind woman on the other end of that call, also below the poverty line on a GS-nothing salary, who now has to deal with a fax machine (hopefully virtual!) she also can't see spitting out 512 pages and jamming. This guy is ... Something.

This reminds me of a story from BOFH ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell ), where he used a black piece of paper, put it into the fax machine, glued both ends together, so the fax scanned an endless roll of black paper and pressed send.

I don’t like the AI writing style anymore. It’s very readable and it has great words, but it’s lacking imperfections. Like a raytraced 3D render of mathematically perfect shapes.

When the government imposes these rules, this is an outcome they callously ignore.

Sure, we can rightly criticize the author for their abuse towards this working class government employee.

But then to some degree we're guilty of what the author is guilty of. We're fighting each other.

Let's focus our outrage on the people who made these rules. And that keep making more rules like them.

Not that we shouldn't have rules to prevent "welfare fraud". But that it's unacceptable for such rules to make it harder to receive benefits that you're entitled to.

And for many of our representatives, making it more difficult to receive benefits isn't just a side effect of bad anti-fraud policy, it's actually the point.

Let's focus our outrage on them and demand change.

Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on.

A fax is very useful to bureaucracies because it is hard to prove a fax was ever sent or received at all. It might never arrived and wasn't retried, might have been printed as empty pages, maybe someone else picked it up.

This is why it is so useful when someone on the other end wants to delay (the equivalent of closing a bug as can't reproduce). This is why governments like faxes and why this story is so unlikely (no chance anyone will call back in that event)

And then everybody, including the fax machine, stood up and clapped.

In 1998 I worked IT at a government facility and one of my responsibilities was e-fax. Nearly 30 years ago we didn’t print paper copies of everything that was faxed to us or that was sent as a fax…

Every country has different norms about these things.

If it were India, you have to pay a 'tax', mostly directly to the bureaucrat or using the workflow setup by the bureaucrat -- its another person outside 'taking care' of these things or his security guard/watchman or another low level employee. It can't be done remotely, you have to go to office and figure out the workflow and the right person. Most third world countries have some version of this configuration.

In US, there are lawyers who get you disability, no problem, they take care of everything for you, and take 50%. Millions of people are on fake disability thanks to these kind lawyers.

Ultimately, most people in Govt (politicians/bureaucrats) are entitled to ALL the money that Govt collects (steals?), and they have different ways of collecting their money. This is just human nature. The Trump regime shows the most innovative ways of doing this, it is quite admirable.

I cant wait for useless jobs like Karen's from Compliance to be replaced with a highly capable AI that is tuned to think on it's feet (so to speak).

Yes, I realize there will be cynics who say "The difficulty is by design to deny benefits", but I also think a lot of well meaning policies are hamstrung by the implementation (especially of software). Claude + Code for America can fix this.